FTL: How to create a custom ship
What you need
- Superluminal [FTL Ship Editor]
http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 251#p36911
A graphic program [Photoshop, Gimp or even Paint would work]
Slipstream Mod Manager, which you probably already own
http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=17102
Optional FTL Unpacker
http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2788
The very first thing you should do, is extracting the resource.dat and data.dat via the FTL Unpacker. Just start up the jar and browse and extract the files to a desired directory. I would recommend creating a new folder (something like FTL Mod) with some subfolders like “Resources”, “Ship Graphics” and “Tools”. It made organizing stuff for me a lot easier. However let’s get started with the modding for real this time
1. Ship Design
If you want to, you can first figure out what you want your ship to do. You could plan the the ship in terms of its playstyle, what weapons, augments, systems, crew, drones etc. you want on the ship. However for me the design was more important, so my first step was drawing the graphics of the ship. Obviously that’s what you need your graphic program of choice for. All the built-in ships are between 400x400 and about 700x400 pixels. For me 500x500 still worked but it’s a bit too big for the hangar. The final hull graphic should have a transparent background. If you want to have a look at the built-in ships you can find them under resources/resources.dat-unpacked/img/ship [in your extracted resources folder]. The next step is drawing a shield. I just took one of the built-in shield graphics (from resources> img> ship) which almost fitted to my ship and streched it. Though you can draw your own if you want.
2. Setting up the ship
If you are done with your ship hull you can start up the really helpful software “Superluminal”. Once started up you can click on File > New Ship. The first thing you want to do here is loading up your ship hull, shield aswell as a floor file. You can do that by clicking on the “Hull”, “Shield” and “Floor” buttons and selecting your <ship>.png and <hull>.png and <floor>.png files. I just took a transparent png for the floor but if you want to, you can draw a better looking floor. You can get the transparent file here: http://toothycat.net/~hologram/FTL/transparent.png. When you’ve got the ship on screen you can adjust it to the grid on the background to your liking. One grid-square is the size of one room block. Now you can draw the different rooms with the “Room Creation Tool” (located on the right of the cursor-tool-thingy). You can right-click your rooms to link different (sub-)systems to them [Tip: you need to switch to the cursor (selection-) tool to right click the rooms. The room creation tool is for creating rooms only]. I would recommend drawing all rooms before adding the doors and systems. You can add doors with the tool on the right of the room creation tool. If you’ve done that you can define the weapon mounts with the next tool, the “Weapon Mounting Tool”. If you’ve done that aswell be sure to save your project under File> Save Project as.... Next thing you want to do is check out the “Properties” tab. Adjust it to your liking. After that it’s really important to go under Edit and click “Calculate Optimal Offset” before exporting your ship. This option is just great and helped me a lot since I used another ship editor before and had issues with positioning the ship correctly. Now I’d recommend checking out how your ship looks ingame. Just click File> Export Ship. A new window will appear. The Blueprint name (ID) is very important. Chose the one you want to replace ingame (ie. I chose “PLAYER_SHIP_CIRCLE” with my ship, so it replaced “The Torus”-ship). Now start Slipstream Mod Manager, chose your <ship>.ftl and have a look at the ship ingame.
3. Adjusting the ship
So the basic ship is done. As you may have noticed though there are more tabs called “Cloak” and “MiniShip”. The Cloak is, as you may have guessed, the cloak graphic, which will show up when cloaking (so much cloak going on...). The miniship is the little preview image of your ship which shows up on the highscore screen. Other than that you can also add gibs, via the “Gib Editing Tool”. You just need to create .pngs of different parts of your ship that will fall apart when the ship gets destroyed.
4. Adjusting the blueprints.xml.append
I don’t know if only I had the problem, but I couldn’t change the “Systems”-settings under the properties tab. So I did export the final ship and opened the <ship>.ftl with 7Zip. When opened with 7Zip you will see a folder called “data” in that folder a file called “blueprints.xml.append”. Extract that file and open it with the Editor or Notepad++. In there you can change the different system settings aswell as the ships health, starting power and some other options.
5. Play!
Export the final .ftl install it and start playing!
ATTENTION
This tutorial is not yet optimized for the Advanced Edition! Some rooms / features are still missing.
If you have any question don’t bother asking me (Zimpliztic on the FTLGame Forum).
I know there already is another tutorial about how to create a custom player ship for FTL (http://toothycat.net/~hologram/FTL/Ship ... orial.html) but I think it's not really up to date and that creating ships with the program Superluminal is way easier. So this is my little tutorial on how to create your very own ship. If you want to get it in .pdf format you can get that here. So let's get started!